Mary Antin's Letter to her Uncle Moshe Hayyim Weltman, 1894 [Extract]

Source Description

In 1894
Mary Antin (born
Maryasche Antin) from the Belarusian town of Polotzk, her mother
and three siblings traveled via Hamburg to
Boston,
her father already having gone ahead. Immediately after her arrival in 1894, Mary Antin gave an account of her voyage in a letter to her
maternal uncle, Moshe Hayyim Weltman in
Polotzk.
According to the history of this letter as told by Mary Antin herself, her
lamp tipped over shortly before she had finished the letter. Since kerosene
had been spilled all over it, she had to write a new copy. In 1899 she published an English version of the account
originally written in Yiddish based on the kerosene-doused original titled
From Plotzk to Boston.
The English version written when she was 18 was intended for the American
public and differed noticeably in style from the letter written in Yiddish
to her uncle and relatives back home in Russia when she was
thirteen, which is the document discussed here. Literarily gifted Mary Antin was
considered a child prodigy, and the publication funded by Jewish patrons was
supposed to enable her further education. Mary Antin was supported
by her teacher, Mary
Dillingham, Boston Jewish
philanthropists
Lina and Jacob
Hecht, and their friend, the well-known Jewish
writer
Israel Zangwill.
The latter established contact with the journal American Hebrew, which
printed the English version in serial form in 1899
before it was published as a book. In light of increasing xenophobia and
political campaigns against mass immigration to the U. S., Antin’s patrons sought
to present an exemplar of integration benefitting the country. In 1910
Mary Antin got
hold of the original letter while on a visit to Russia. In 1914 her brother-in-law, John
F. Grabau, had the letter bound and donated it to the
Boston Public
Library, where it is still located today, along with an
introduction to the history of the manuscript written in English by
Mary Antin.

The original manuscript is 68 pages long; due to an error, its
pagination jumps from page 55 to page 60. This source interpretation is
based on a transcript and English
translation of the letter published in 2013 by Sunny Yudkoff.